Flying and Smoking
11
explains, “part of the selling of the circus as an entertainment has always
involved the selling of the people who are its performers: in other words the
creation of stars” (2000: 55). Female trapeze performers became central to the
selling of the circus at least until 1951.
While circus athleticism preceded other forms of publicly acceptable
physical training for women, it would only openly advertise its physical culture
benefits from the 1920s once physical activity became socially acceptable.5
What might now be recognised as a contradiction, that a highly trained athletic
and therefore recognisably healthy body promotes cigarettes, was not so
apparent in the late 1940s era of these three Camel advertisements. Increased
social acceptance of female participation in physical activities like gymnastics,
with its capacity for social empowerment through the body’s “motor activity”
(Hargreaves and Vertinsky 2007: 2), and circus belongs with sporting culture
(Carmeli 1996), also coincides with the rise in female smokers in developed
societies.
In arguing that mass marketing encourages consumers to value image over
other qualities, Michael Schudson reveals how North American women from the
1920s used smoking to “display their modernity” (1984: 196). In her exploration
of the history of women smoking in the UK, Tinkler writes that, in the UK, from
a number of female smokers too small to record, “By 1949, 41 per cent of
women aged sixteen years and over, from across the social-class spectrum, were
smokers” (2006: 2). Tinkler shows how women were seen to smoke and visual
images of women smokers in the media proliferated during the twentieth
century. Tinkler writes, “Smoking was, however, more than just a sign of
modernity, the practice of smoking actually contributed to the making of modem
women” (2006: 12). Similarly, displays of athletic females on trapeze were a
creation of modernism.
The Camel brand was promoted nationally in the USA by the R.J. Reynolds
Tobacco Company with a series of four camel images in a $1,500,000
campaign, and by 1919 it was the biggest selling brand with 50 percent of the
market (Webb Smith 1990: 31). From the 1920s Camel print advertisements in
the USA, often showing female smokers, had deployed ideas of smoking as
indicative of wealth and success, and of American nationalism, and even
curative of nerves and the associated ills of modernity (Marchand 1985: 197,
274, 341). As Richard Klein points out, cigarettes are perceived to relieve
tension and anxiety, and this was especially significant in wartime (1993: xi). If
women’s integration into the work force during World War II may have
hastened the breakdown of social restraints around respectable women smoking,
then after the war, cigarette promotion may have maintained its association with
an exciting but dangerous life through the circus.
The anti-smoking public health campaigns after the 1960-70s in England,
North America, and Australia have undermined the promotion of cigarettes in
association with athletic activity6—the campaigns against the visible brands of
sponsoring cigarette companies on sports fields come to mind. From the 1920s-